Monday, August 7, 2017

Best And Worst Diets In The World

Not on the Mediterranean diet.

Medscape made a list of the best and worst diets in the world. The results are rather predictable. Americans in general eat all the wrong foods. Our meals are high in fat, salt, and sugar. They're usually highly processed because who in America has time to cook meals from scratch each night after both parents come back from their ten hour days at work.

The best diets are probably what you would guess. The Mediterranean diet comes in for high praise, with their emphasis on whole grains, lots of fruits and vegetables, and lean proteins. The French diet is also highly ranked, despite their foods that are loaded with fats and creams. Maybe it's all the red wine that keeps the cardiovascular disease away. Naturally the Japanese diet was mentioned since half their population is more than 80 years old.

A few of the national cuisines that are highlighted seem to be of a dubious nature. Believe it or not, the food of Chad, the West African/sub Sahara country, was recognized for its healthy nature because of its prevalence of unprocessed high fiber food. That is if you can get any while roaming through the Saharan sands and trying to evade the radical Islamists that terrorize that region of the continent.

The foods of India are also considered healthy. "Goats, chickens, and sheep often roam freely and are fed a naturally organic diet." Sounds like the livestock there eat whatever trash they find along the side of the road. No thanks. I prefer that the animal meat that I consume has been given a well controlled diet over one that may have just plucked up some worm slithering in the mud near a giant trash pile.

Even the tiny island nation of Barbados comes in for acclaim. Their diet consists mostly of fruits and vegetables. In fact their people are some of the highest consumers of plants in the world. Maybe it's because their land doesn't have enough room to raise livestock?

Essentially what this Medscape list is trying to show is that it is better if we all eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains while consuming less meats and processed sugars. That regimen is highly replicable and not limited to any one particular nation in the world.